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Sudbury Public Schools (SPS) teachers held signs in Sudbury’s town center on Friday, November 14. They’re calling for a “fair contract” while negotiations with the district are ongoing.
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) data indicates that SPS teachers have an average salary of $100,892, putting them in the top 20 in the state when excluding the charter schools included in the DESE data. The DESE data was updated in 2023.
Comparable districts like Wayland, Dover-Sherborn, Weston and Concord-Carlisle range from $105,651 for Wayland and a chart-topping $117,960 for Concord-Carlisle. It’s important to note that new contracts may have been put in place for many districts since this data was uploaded. Furthermore, pay varies dramatically depending on tenure, advanced degrees and other criteria in some contracts. New teachers often receive base pay well below the $75,000 minimum living wage in Massachusetts.
The teachers union utilized similar tactics when negotiating their contract with SPS in 2021-2022. At that time, the teachers agreed to a paltry 1.5% one-time payment (or $750, whichever was higher) in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 2% cost of living adjustment (COLA) in each of the three years of the contract. The SPS School Committee was led by chair Silvia Nerssessian and vice chair Meredith Gerson at the time.
The COLA adjustments proved to be significantly weaker than many peer districts throughout the state, and ended up lagging far behind skyrocketing inflation in the years covered by the contract.
In some cases, districts have negotiated agreements that tried to make teachers whole after they accepted weak contracts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bedford settled a teachers contract in 2024 and it included a retroactive 5% COLA for the first year and “In addition, all current members who were employed during the 2020-2021 school year (when the BEA accepted a 0% COLA in the face of fiscal uncertainty during the pandemic) will receive a one-time payment of 5.5% of their annual salary in FY21.”
Living Month to Month
Under the same committee leadership (Nerssessian and Gerson) that negotiated the prior teacher’s contract at SPS, the district pursued an override for $745,000 in 2023. That amount only covered half of the budget shortfall reported by Superintendent Brad Crozier during the budget building process. That led members of the Select Board to question SPS if they were asking for enough in the override. (Timestamp 18:50 in the video below)
Later that same year, just months after the override was approved at Annual Town Meeting, the committee came back to taxpayers for an additional $232,000 that they claimed to urgently need for unanticipated student needs. The district used a deceptive maneuver to frame the article as a transfer of State aid into the SPS budget, but it was actually a budget increase and a corresponding tax increase on residents.
In the last several years SPS has struggled to maintain level service budgets despite strong budget guidance from Town Hall and a relatively modest contract for the teachers from 2022-2025.
Just last year, Town Manager Andy Sheehan had to search the couch cushions for an extra $120,000 so SPS could hire an assistant principal that they couldn’t fit into their operating budget otherwise. That was on top of a strong guidance figure for the SPS budget.
Meanwhile, Sheehan has warned of Town-wide budget pressures and the potential need for an override in the next few fiscal years. Most Massachusetts towns are struggling to maintain services due to relentless fiscal pressures.
Tough Timing in Tough Times
The Sudbury Education Association may have made a grave mistake agreeing to a weak contract when negotiating with Nerssessian and Gerson back in 2022. Combined with an undersized 2023 SPS override and fiscal gimmicks like the Chapter 70 maneuver, almost all flexibility has been squeezed out of the SPS budget.
The timing of the SPS negotiations raises questions about what’s fiscally feasible. In addition to macro pressures felt across the state, the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School School Committee already settled with their teachers earlier this year. They agreed to a total of a 7.375% COLA over three years.
Perhaps more challenging for SPS teachers — they are negotiating after most other collective bargaining groups in Sudbury have reached agreements, they have to do it with a gloomy financial forecast hanging over all three of Sudbury’s cost centers, and they have to do it while taxpayers themselves navigate record-setting layoffs, high prices, and economic uncertainty.
If the teachers hold their ground, it’s possible that a large override would be required to keep their pay competitive with peer districts and return a reasonable level of sustainability to the SPS budget. The alternative might be deep cuts that balloon class sizes for students who haven’t fully bounced back to pre-pandemic academic achievement levels.
With dozens of teachers holding signs in town center and a track record of SPS struggling to maintain level services since the override, the Sudbury Select Board has a definitive answer to their January 2023 question:
No, SPS wasn’t asking for enough in that override.
The looming question for Sudbury is less about the finances themselves. Can the (almost) all-new SPS School Committee — that inherited a budget stretched to the extreme — find a deal that works for teachers and put the SPS budget back on a path to sustainability?